A novel full of brave cliches
It’s been a decade since his last adult novel but Frey — described by Time as “America’s most notorious writer” after controversy surrounding his 2003 debut A Million Little Pieces, a memoir which, it turned out, contained more fiction than truth — is back.
Katerina skips back and forth between Los Angeles in 2017, where we see Jay as a jaded writer-turned-entertainment hot-shot, and Paris in 1992 when he’s just starting out. Reading Henry Miller’s Tropic of Cancer sets him on a whirlwind re-evaluation of his life and within a few pages he’s dumped his girlfriend and sold enough cocaine to afford a plane ticket to the City of Lights.
Despite similarities with Frey’s own life (a Milleresque trip to Paris when he was 21; he now heads the phenomenally successful entertainment company, Full Fathoms Five) this is marketed as a novel. Jay might have gone to Paris to pen the Great American Novel but all he really does is drink a lot, go to art galleries and float failed manuscripts down the Seine. He’s a charmed bohemian, though.
Despite being a penniless alcoholic, he meets beautiful French girls in cafes who are keen for quick and passionate hook-ups in heritage apartments.
And then he meets Katerina, a model from Norway who stumbles on him at the Rodin Museum where he’s admiring the sculptor’s Gates of Hell. Sample dialogue: “You’re playing hard to get. That’s kind of cute . . . You can look at me. I’m not Medusa.”
Frey takes some Bukowski (there’s a whole interlude where Jay and some friends hit a beerfest in Germany that has no reason for being there), lots of Miller and what appears to be his memories of the Penthouse letters page and weaves together a story so full of cliche it’s almost brave.
It might’ve even worked if the self-important Jay wasn’t given so much page time; the angry, depressed and successful Jay is far more interesting. “They give me stupid amounts of money. I do what they want and give them what they pay me for and I hate myself . . . And when I stop long enough to think about what I’m doing . . . I want to buy a gun and blow my f***ing brains out“.
And, odds on, Frey will get more crazy money for this when Hollywood swoops up the film rights.